Automobiles and light trucks of current manufacture contain many components that are acquired in packaged form from outside suppliers. The packaged components reduce the time required to assemble automotive vehicles and further improve the quality of the vehicles by eliminating critical adjustments from the assembly line. So-called “wheel ends” represent one type of packaged component that has facilitated the assembly of automotive vehicles. A wheel end together with other components to which the wheel end is connected form part of a so-called “corner module”.
The typical wheel end has a housing that is bolted against a steering knuckle or other suspension upright, a hub provided with a flange to which a road wheel is attached and also a spindle that projects from the flange into the housing, and an antifriction bearing located between the housing and the hub spindle to enable the hub to rotate in the housing with minimal friction. If the road wheel propels the vehicle, the hub of the wheel end is coupled to an axle shaft through a constant velocity (CV) joint, which also forms part of the corner module.
The typical CV joint has a bell, which contains components for accommodating misalignment between the axle shaft and the hub, and also a stub shaft that projects through the hub. The stub shaft serves to clamp the CV joint to the hub and to transfer drive torque from the axle shaft to the hub. To this end, the stub shaft has an external spline that mates with an internal spline in the hub.
The bearings currently used in wheel ends for most automobiles require raceways of substantial diameter. As a consequence, the hub is quite large. As such, it can accommodate a stub shaft of a diameter great enough to transfer torque from the axle shaft to the road wheel. But tapered roller bearings transfer equivalent loads with raceways of lesser diameter. Even so, the wheel end must remain essentially the same size, because the drive torque cannot be transferred through a stub shaft of lesser diameter.
The present invention eliminates the stub shaft of the CV joint from the torque transfer path and indeed changes the torque transfer path to a larger diameter. Thus, the stub shaft does not limit the size of the bearing and the wheel end of which the bearing is a part.